


Strength

by jaythewriter



Series: Misplaced Attachments [7]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Alex wants strength here, Jay wanted to help Tim find 'closure', LONG TAGS I'M SORRY, M/M, Multi, also i have found the titles for these post-MA fics are a trend in that they're things the boys want, another post-MA continuation story to check in with one of the boys, some issues just don't go away right away, this one is really sad and you gotta remember, who knows what Tim will want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:44:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1549379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythewriter/pseuds/jaythewriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex's past continues to follow him even when he thinks he’s free of it. He can't fight his way out of the pain alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strength

**Author's Note:**

> Huge Trigger Warning for self-harm, one instance of physical abuse, implied instances of domestic emotional abuse, mentions of alcohol, and knives. Tell me if I missed any.

It’s easy for Jay to forgive you, even if his heart is giving him a hard time of it. 

(You don’t blame him, because you can’t shake the image a rock narrowly missing your face with a hand upon your throat. It’s hardly the same level as his trauma, but it still haunts you, clinging to your brain like a leech that hungers for your peace of mind.)

But the prospect of knowing it wasn’t /you/ who took out the gun, it wasn’t you who broke the skull of a man you had never even seen before, wasn’t you who stood over Jessica’s prone body while you held that same gun-- it’s enough for Jay. 

He understands what the creature does to a mind, takes all that rage and fear and stirs it into something wrong, something that trickles through one’s veins like poison until it’s in control. It happened to him, though even then, Jay was far too gentle to do more than flail about and scream out empty threats.

He doesn’t blame you, so he can forgive you.

Tim... Tim is, again, understandably, not able to forgive you the same way Jay did.

Jay dropped his defenses. They’re still there, engrained into his instincts, but he can lay close to you at night now without shaking and begging you to remind him that it’s you he’s next to. 

Tim looks at you, though, and sees the figure that both directly and indirectly took away so much: months of his life that could’ve been spent recovering, his identity, nearly took away the last person he could call a friend.

The life of his first and best friend.

The bitterness that grows from all of that doesn’t wash away with a couple of apologies and kind actions. You get that. 

But Tim is trying to keep it stowed away in the back of some unspoken closet now, along with all the skeletons that they’re keeping hidden from your mother and anybody else that might get a bit nosey about your pasts. He understands enough that, maybe, you’re not the dangerous creature that once lurked in the shadows, waiting to pounce.

The ‘maybe’ is important. You have to watch your step, keep every action innocent, and only then do you both manage to coexist like two friends making an awful movie together would.

Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass. Nobody likes being seen as something they’re not, even if it’s a low-key suspicion rather than an outright accusation that he’s actually a plotting manipulative monster.

But when you see Jay sitting across from you at the kitchen table, shyly smiling at your mother, talking about the deer that come poking about in the backyard-- when you see him and Tim together on the couch, Jay’s head in his lap-- when the both of them are sleeping crowded up against you, Jay’s laptop still open to a document with a slew of new novel ideas and Tim still dressed for work...

The effort is worth it.

Still.

(Of course there’s a still, an although, a but--)

You can’t forgive yourself on either level. Can’t forgive yourself the way Jay has, can’t begin to tolerate yourself as Tim has come to tolerate you.

Sure, the distractions of everyday life keep you from constantly thinking about it, just as you did before you found your way back into your childhood home. 

Tim gripes all day about working at the animal shelter, about how fucking noisy the dogs are and that it smells, but you can see the satisfaction he gets out of seeing those animals go to a good home. This morning he spoke of a little girl adopting the oldest cat, one that surely never would have been picked out when there were hundreds of teeny tiny cute kittens. But she wanted the old one, and even you couldn’t keep from grinning at the way Tim’s voice went high with giddy excitement when he described how loudly the cat purred while curled up in the girl’s lap. 

Jay’s life isn’t nearly as busy; he’s not having as much success with finding a job but he doesn’t seem to be bothered as much as when he first arrived to your home. Your mother reassures him as often as possible: as long as he’s making you happy with his presence, she could care less about the bit of extra money she’s spending. After all, she’s basically spending as much as before, with her ex-husband gone and Tim paying for his own food.

With the worries of being jobless brushed aside for the most part, Jay spends his time tapping away at his laptop, writing out whatever sounds even vaguely novel-like in his head and running it by you. Every time, you warn him that you’re maybe not the best audience considering the sort of things you wrote in college (and, okay, would likely write now), but he insists anyway.

And. Well. It’s good. You can spy all the references to a life gone by, with the monsters that all bear the same long limbs and the featureless faces and the constant paranoia. It hits too close to home sometimes, but you’ve managed to get through all of it, and you definitely think he’s got something worth sharing with the world.

Then there’s your mother, perhaps the most distracting of all with her need to talk to you nearly every second of the day and you with your willing ears. There’s nothing particularly huge going on for her but she does try her best to wring as much information out of you as possible. You and the others have done well in keeping the story about the past few years fairly clean and believable, but your mother isn’t stupid, no matter what anyone who has first met her might say. 

She is rarely successful. It’s kind of endearing, you think, that she would be this concerned about not only you but these two near-strangers that wandered into the house with you bearing gaunt faces and frightened eyes. You’d expect it to annoy you, to have her prod and poke at you every day like this, a hopeful little gleam in the eyes that are scarily similar to your own.

But she does it in such a way that you’re not bothered. You know she’s not doing it to be nosey; she’s genuinely concerned, and she wants to help you three the best she can.

She’s doing all she can truly do already, in your opinion, and because of that (and that you’ll never, ever let her know of the awful things you did when your hands were not your own), you feel she doesn’t need to know any more than she already does.

It’s all distracting, so very distracting.

But when Tim is at work, and Jay is out back, looking to the sky and breathing in the air without fear of catching the ominous whiff of death and fear creeping up on him, and your mother is out in her garden...

You’re alone.

Alone with your mind. Your thoughts. Your memories.

You see it all again, one rushing train wreck after the other, another drop of blood splattering over your hands and running through the creases of your palms, one more night lost to a consciousness that isn’t yours.

And you can’t stop yourself.

The guilt is agonizing, laying heavy on your broken bones and you want it all gone, it’s unbearable and chokes you of your breath. You can’t live like this and you want someone, something to punish you, give you what you deserve, and there’s only one way-- 

(Jay might say you’ve suffered enough, to see what you’ve done after lying nearly unconscious for years and then coming back up in a sea of blood.)

(You don’t agree.)

It’s getting harder to hide the scars. You’re dressing one now, heart racing. Jay is downstairs after writing outside for a few hours and you know he’s going to come poking around to see if you’re awake yet. 

Pink and red floods the sink in varying tints, trickling from your arm and tumbling into the faucet’s stream. You try to crane your neck, peering out into the darkened hallway. The floor looks clear at first glance, but you can’t tell for sure if you’ve managed to make it to the bathroom without making a mess. Surely Jay won’t make a big deal out of examining the fucking carpet when he climbs the steps, but that doesn’t stop your heart from pounding away against your aching ribcage.

You’re such a fucking problem. As happy as you are with your distractions, with Jay, Tim, your mother, it almost feels like you’re putting on an act for them to make sure they don’t see that there’s still something going on. Jay surely believes all is well now that you’re not drunk off your face every night, but you’ve found that it’s extremely easy to switch from one source of relief to another. 

And like /hell/ you’re going to let Tim even think you’re anything but okay. You’re not certain how the two would link up, but the paranoia is there, warning you of the implications that Tim would see if he found out. He’d know you’re thinking about those times again, about how guilty you are, and if you’re so guilty, then surely you’re truly the one who was behind the wheel when your hands went and tore apart the lives of all those people. 

He’ll take Jay, and he’ll go, and you’ll have nothing.

And your mother... god.

(You already ran into that issue once. Of course it was at the tail end of your so-called recovery with drinking, not so soon after you, Tim, and Jay began sharing your bedroom and pretending the guestroom didn’t exist.)

(So you weren’t totally yourself, with the twitching still coming and going, and you spaced out every so often, staring into space and waking an hour or so later to find that you fell asleep-- or maybe even passed out in your kitchen chair, coffee going cold in its mug.)

(Your f-- your mother’s ex-husband, he was already suspicious and poking at you far harder than your mother ever did. Every opportunity he caught you alone, it would be the same questions.)

(“So. You wanna talk about it?”)

(Sometimes he’d be gentle, almost reasonable about it, like he was giving you a choice about talking. But as soon as you would shrug him off and say you didn’t feel like it, he’d push harder.)

(“C’mon. I’m your dad. You’ve gotta tell me. And y’know, hah, I could find out somehow, I’ve got my ways.”)

(He’d joke, like it was a normal conversation, like he was expecting an innocent answer, but he clearly didn’t. His determination to find answers was proof of that. And anyway, you never could help scoffing at him when he acted as though his power through the military or whatever could give him insight to your activities.)

(You never left a trail for others to find. With the YouTube videos privated too and every online trace of the activity erased, you might as well have simply popped out of existence for a few years after college and decided, hey, maybe you ought to get back to the real world, who knows what’s going on there.)

(He wouldn’t be able to find /shit/. His underhanded threats were empty as they were laughable.)

(“Okay. Alex. You know you’re scaring your mother, keeping all these secrets? She’s really worried about you.”)

(Ah, the mom card, the only one that even came close to working on you. You care about your mother, you’ll do anything to keep her happy, especially lie to keep from breaking her heart.)

(But you knew right away that he was being a sneaky asshole, using your mother against you to talk. He knew that she wanted you to talk on your own time, not have the information forcibly pulled from your throat.)

(So again, you brushed him off.)

(When all of that failed, you expected him to back off for a bit, or maybe become hostile in his questioning, bringing up drugs or how you might be putting the family in danger by keeping secrets because surely these secrets must be dangerous to everyone involved if you’re so protective of them.)

(You turned out to be kind of right; he certainly didn’t come in peace when he stomped down the steps that Saturday morning with clenched fists and purpose in his hard jaw.)

(“What the hell is wrong with you?!”)

(Of course, as your luck had it, he found you in the middle of a shiverfest, as you came to call it. You expected to be safe in the kitchen with the early hour. The sun wasn’t even peering in past the dusty windows yet.)

(But you’d been away from home long enough that you’d forgotten your father wasn’t a late riser. ‘Military thing’, he’d say.)

(You can’t remember why you were sitting out in the kitchen in the first place. The most likely reason is that you caught yourself shaking when you awoke in bed, and you got up to keep from waking the two men huddled up at your side.)

(Usually, you’re too out of it to be that considerate-- and to be honest, you’re not the most considerate person as it is-- but clearly, no good deed goes unpunished in the Kralie home.)

(“M’just cold,” you lied, and you can still hear those heavy feet on the floor, loud enough that you expected the floor to crack beneath him. You even looked down just to be sure, and of course the floor was fine-- and then your view was nothing but ceiling, and your skull was aching, surely cracking into pieces right then and there.)

(“Cold, my ass,” your father hissed, and then there was a pair of fists around your raggedy shirt from your high school days, tight on your stomach and arms. It nearly tore from the force of his tugging. He demanded something of you, though the words were lost in the flood that came tumbling through your brain. You uttered a crackly ‘what?’, only to have the flood be overwhelmed by the explosion of sound inside your head.)

(“I know you’re on something, kid, you’re not acting like a normal fucking person!” he snarled. At least, you thought that was what he said. He could’ve honestly said anything and it wouldn’t have mattered. The moment you figured out that this was just a particularly violent round of interrogation, you shut down.)

(Batting away from him, you stumbled backwards, balance refusing to return to your alcohol-starved body. The sharp edge of the kitchen counter dug into your lower back, sending a heightened wave of pain rolling through your hips and spine.)

(“Leave me alone,” you managed through a cotton mouth. You didn’t make a single move after that; you weren’t capable of movement with the overwhelming mixture of his attack and your still-going storm of shivers.)

(Yet he saw something threatening within you, and he felt that it warranted more than grabbing hands and harsh words.)

(For a moment, you thought that your head actually burst open, and it wouldn’t be long before you were dead-- but then it occurred to you that maybe you wouldn’t be quite as conscious if you’d actually exploded.)

(Reaching with a trembling hand, you put your hand over your eye, where your pulse throbbed with every rush of blood. The skin was tender, and soon, it would go black and purple as it swelled over.)

(“Kid...”)

(He stood over where you sat on the floor, back to the cabinets full of cleaning liquids and toxic chemicals. You could scarcely see him with your glasses halfway across the floor. The man might as well have been a couple of sentient dark smudges for all that you could see of him.)

(“You don’t get to tell me to leave ya alone if you’re bringing drugs into this home. I’m not letting you put your mother or me in danger of anyone lookin’ for money, ‘cos I know you sure as hell don’t have any money to be givin’ them.”)

(You wanted to tell him where he could stick his paranoia and fucking accusations. Somewhere along the way though, you forgot entirely how to speak, and all you could utter were little ‘no’s, you honestly hadn’t /done/ anything, for once you were innocent, for /once/, and you reached to swat him away when you saw the thing that resembled his arm move, and, and your sleeve must’ve slid away, because.)

(Because. He saw.)

(Silence rolled over the kitchen, though the ringing in your ears was loud enough for you to pretend otherwise. You sat and waited, knowing that he must have something to say to you.)

(It never came.)

(“Sean, what’re you doing down here, can hear you screamin’ from-- ...”)

(Instead, you heard your mother’s voice. Her silence was far sharper, far more furious. You shrank into yourself and you were ten again, waiting for the inevitable blow-up between two very different parents, two very different people, too different for each other.)

(You pulled your sleeve back into place for good measure.)

(“Alex. Get upstairs. Now.”)

(There was no questioning that tone of voice. You darted past your father and your mother, feet skidding clumsily against the tile floor. Suddenly you weren’t shivering anymore, like she scared the shakes right out of your system.)

(Jay and Tim were still in bed, of course, and neither of them stirred as you nearly dive-bombed the mattress. Tim inched away from you, and Jay did the opposite, hiding away in your neck and sighing hotly over the numb skin.)

(You hid your face in his hair, trying to regain control of your breathing.)

(The men on either side of you eventually did awaken, though you feigned sleep rather than face them. They spoke quietly, asking one another if they heard the screaming downstairs earlier and debating whether it would be a good idea to head down there. They did at some point, but only after hearing the familiar stomp of boots and the slam of the elder Kralies’ bedroom door.)

(For hours you laid in what ought to be your tranquil childhood bedroom, staring at the posters of bands whose music you couldn’t remember and the scattered essays you kept thinking they’d come in handy while you were off being a big old director.)

(Your heart hummed in your ears the entire time, making sure you knew how frightened you were.)

(The house came to life once Tim and Jay were downstairs, their voices traveling up the steps along with your mother’s. She had softened, laughing at the men every so often and chiding them for being so noisy while you were asleep.)

(Then the creaking of the steps came, and you hid away in the blankets like Satan himself was climbing up to hunt you down.)

(“Alex.”)

(Her voice followed the soft whine of your rusty doorframe. There was nothing in her voice for you to pick apart and analyze for danger, anything that might blow up in your face and drag you deeper into any further trouble.)

(“Alex, we need to talk.”)

(“Are you sure we /need/ to?” you asked of her. Her responding sigh wasn’t one of exasperation, which seemed like a good sign, so you came out from beneath the sheets at last. With the blankets twisting around your legs and your gaze upon her, you saw that she wasn’t wearing the same pinched expression as she was before. She wasn’t reigning herself in or holding back.)

(You deflated, letting the fear flood out from your system. You were safe.)

(“Your father... he and I have been having, well, problems, for a long time,” she began, letting herself sit at the edge of the bed. She worried the fitted sheet between her long fingers, chipping painted nails scratching against the fabric. “He’s been much more aggressive, as I think you can tell.”)

(You tried your best not to laugh.)

(“And we’ve been trying to get him to take care of it,” your mother went on, ignoring the twitchy smirk on your lips. “He went to counseling, and, and basically, I think that military training of his is too deeply ingrained in him for to shake it off. Some people might be able to live with it, but...”)

(You imagined all of what must’ve went on while you were gone. Broken plates and overreactions, eggshells constantly lain out beneath her feet, heated arguments that ended with your mother on the ground and begging that man to calm down, and maybe he did, but it wouldn’t be long before he was back at it again.)

(You remembered all of that and more while you were here before. Blood ran hot inside of you at the thought that it somehow got worse without you around.)

(The pause between the two of you was brief, but your mother could have taken all the time in the world if she needed it. Her eyes were tired, bloodshot and rimmed with black, and her normally smiling face was dull, lacking the rosy cheeks you’ve come to expect.)

(She closed her eyes and appeared to count to herself for a moment. One, two, three, four.)

(“What I’m trying to say is that we’re going to be separating soon. And I didn’t want to tell you the moment you and Jay and Tim first came here,” she told you, a genuine apology shining within her eyes. “But I didn’t want to tell you now and have you thinking we were separating solely due to what just happened downstairs-- I mean,” she pauses, angered lines crossing her face. “It is part of it. Because if he thinks he can get away with that in my household he’s got another thing coming. But it’s not just that.”)

(Did it make you a bad person that the first thought floating through your mind at her reassurance was that you didn’t care whether you were the cause of their separation? A guilty wave of nausea passed through you, though it hardly lasted long.)

(So long as your mother was safe, you could give a damn about your father.)

(She actually tried to be a parent. Him, on the other hand, tried to rule the home as a dictator.)

(“I understand,” you said eventually. She didn’t need to know about the indifference you had towards the man she married. She’d had enough trouble today.)

(“I’m sorry,” you added as an afterthought. You weren’t sure what you were apologizing for, but someone in this house ought to apologize to your mother for all the shit she went through. She smiled, her gentle hand coming up to touch your cheek and stroke the swelling skin.)

(The smile melted away as she stared into your face. Taking you by the wrist, she coaxed you from bed with a soft ‘c’mere’. You were led into the bathroom across the hall, where she took several sheets of paper towels and bunched them up, soaking them beneath the faucet.)

(“Here, it’ll sting for a moment, probably,” she warned you. She was right; your first instinct was to flinch away, and the cold water dripping past your wincing eyelid definitely didn’t help. You’d faced worse, though, so you struggled through it, pretending that the wet wasn’t coming down past your wrist and dampening your sleeve. The water was worse upon your cuts, making the fabric scratchy and painful against the sensitive skin.)

(It was almost as if she could sense your discomfort there. She looked at you through the toothpaste smudged mirror, a concerned quirk hanging upon her pale lips.)

(“Your father also said something rather worrying to me about you.”)

(“Huh,” you said, ever so casual. You concentrated on the pulsing behind your bruising eye socket, pretended this wasn’t going the way you knew it was going to.)

(But there was no stopping your mother when she was worried about you. Never was.)

(“When we were talking, he said he noticed something on your arm, and...”)

(Her throat bobbed with a wet swallow. Your own had gone dry as a bone.)

(“Do you have anything you want to tell me, Alex?”)

(You did. You wanted to tell her about the nightmares that were too real to be allowed, with your innards being torn from your body and every eye upon you, narrowed in hatred. You wanted to say that you were sorry for keeping so much from her, for keeping silent as long as you had, that you’d done it to keep her safe.)

(You wanted to so fucking bad.)

(But she had enough fucked up men in her life. One was definitely enough. She didn’t need to know, and she certainly knew enough for the two of them to get by.)

(So, you smiled, and shook your head.)

(You’ll do anything to keep your mother happy.)

(Especially lie.)

You are alone in this and you will stay alone as long as you can. You will scrub away all the blood, you will dress the wounds and you will pretend that they aren’t there, hiding them away beneath unseasonably warm clothing. You will keep the nightmares and the guilt and the truth to yourself.

In a sense, nothing has truly changed since you escaped that fucking monster.

But as you go out into the hallway and bump into a rosy-faced Jay, his smile wider than you’ve ever seen it, you know that it’s worth it.

“Alex!” he yelps, grasping for your arm. His fingers wrap around the exact place you were wrapping mere moments ago, like they might secretly know what’s beneath your sleeve. “You never told me that there were a bunch of deer around here!”

His delight is a bit of a punch to the stomach. But not in a bad way. 

“Uh, yeah?” you say with a weak grin. “We live around a forest. Of course there’s going to be deer.”

“But they come right up to the house and they beg if you’ve got food!” Jay cries as he practically tugs your arm from its socket. “C’mon, they’re outside right now and they’ll go if we wait too long.”

“Jay, I’ve lived here,” you state dully. “I have met the deer. They are loud little free-loaders that love to fuck with mom’s garden.”

“Shut up and come on!” he insists before dashing down the stairs, waiting at the bottom for you with big eager eyes. You look down at him, and wonder how it is that you two have gotten to the point where he craves your company this much.

In the end, you can’t bring yourself to care much about the ‘why’.

You’re simply happy because it is something that happens at all, regardless of whether you deserve it or not.

(And if you mess up, you’re going to lose this, you’re going to lose those bright blue eyes and the even brighter smile of the woman that’s curled up on the living room couch when you and Jay pass by, watching her ridiculous soap operas.)

(Hell, you’d even fucking miss Tim if you’re honest.)

(So you’re not going to mess it up. You’re not.)

(There aren’t any ifs, ands, or buts about it.)

\--

The house is frozen in time. 

Your mother slumbers away on the couch, clutching a flowery throw pillow to her chest. Jay sits in the dark leather chair that once belonged to the man you called father, laptop threatening to slide from his knees. His head reclines against the back of the seat, eyes roving beneath their lids. If you’d caught him a bit earlier, he might have jerked awake and promised you that he was just resting his eyes a moment.

You pad across the carpet, approaching Jay and carefully prying his fingers from the computer. He murmurs under his breath, telling an imaginary Tim to stop feeding the hedgehog because it was apparently growing to a gargantuan size. The sigh that leaves you then isn’t one of exasperation, but of fondness for the man, fondness for the mind that manages to cling to innocence and ridiculous thoughts even after all it’s been put through.

The raggedy blanket with faded colors you think your grandmother knit for you lies over the back of the couch. It goes to Jay rather than your mother; he’s still small enough to fit beneath it. Tucking the edges around his form, you kiss his forehead and leave him to his dreams. You do the same with your mother.

You ought to be sleeping yourself. Your body craves it and pleads for it, burdening your bones with the need for it with each step you take. 

You’re used to ignoring your body’s needs. You’ve gotten better about it. But not by much.

Instead of sleeping-- as you ought to be, as you know you should-- you move through the house, wearing your body down. Eventually you’ll pass out, and you won’t have to worry about nightmares creeping up on you and tearing another panicky episode out of you. 

How healthy can it be that you’re doing this to yourself? 

Probably healthier than what the results of an episode would be.

You itch at the raised lines on your skin. It stings, tingling up and down the length of your forearm. 

It’s hot lately. Too hot for you to be wearing jackets or hoodies or anything that might provide proper protection. Still, you’ve worn them obsessively, deflecting any questions with the promise that you’re fine. And you are, you’re just a bit sweaty, sticky, and maybe extremely miserable. 

But not more miserable than you’d be without sleeves. 

At least during these times where the house is silent and unmoving, you’re free to let your skin breathe. The sweat gets beneath the bandages and brings the pain rushing back to life. It worsens if you dare to move the dressings-- your body might as well be punishing you.

(Jay would say that it is. It doesn’t want you doing this. It fights to heal you, it’s designed to keep you alive and moving and sewn together. So it’s punishing you for daring to get in the way of its work.)

(You nearly snarl at the thought. Your body trying to tell you what’s what and be the boss? How dare it.)

(God, you really are fucking exhausted.)

Somebody left the air conditioning on before they passed out. The chill in the house makes coats suddenly very necessary, but you’ll easily take being cold over being itchy. And stinging and sweaty and paranoid.

It occurs to you that maybe all of this is more trouble than it’s worth. You don’t /have/ to rip yourself up and then try to hide everything, going inexplicably manic if somebody so much as questions you.

(But then who else is going to do it? Who else will remind you that you deserve a bit of pain? A lot of it, really. It’ll never make up for everything you’ve done, but hell, you sure can try to make up for it, go ahead, maybe you’ll fucking die and get what you finally deserve.)

You catch yourself in the hall between the kitchen and living room, making a turn towards the steps and preparing to go running for your room. You might have done it, could have gone diving towards the drawer that hides something familiar, something you took from Tim’s backpack while looking for Jay’s old camera once upon a time, a blade that had already become acquainted with your arm--

If the front door hadn’t rattled open then, a splash of yellow light from the porch falling over your form and the man standing at the threshold.

Tim stands there with squinting eyes and a pissy scowl. His work shirt is torn at the edges, likely a gift from a cat or overexcited dog. He lets his bag hit the floor with a much harder thud than necessary. You stare, heart in your throat, literally a deer in the headlights. 

He doesn’t pay any attention to you at first, turning to lock the door back up and shrugging out of his shirt instead. You think for a moment that he somehow didn’t see you there in the hall and you’re out of the clear-- (you aren’t covered you aren’t covered he’s going to see if you don’t get moving but you can’t /move/ you’re too exhausted you’ve fucked yourself over, good fucking /job/)

“Mind throwing this in the trash for me? It’s no good anymore, and I think they have a policy against midriff shirts, not to mention...”

Then he speaks to you, and you know you’re trapped as he turns to face you, bared arm holding out the shirt and his face blank. His eyes are right where you don’t want them to be, and you instinctively hide them behind your back, though it’s far too late. He opens his mouth, something forming upon his face; a snarl, a pitying crease of his brows, then nothing. 

Eventually, he sets his face with a hard jaw and bossy thin lips. 

“Get to the bathroom, you idiot,” he demands.

Maybe once upon a time you would’ve fought him. But this time, you’re too weak (in so many ways, with a tired body and a broken will), and so, you obey. The legs that ignored your urge to flee before find the energy to get you up the steps. Tim lingers at your back, suspicious eyes burning into your hot flustered skin. 

He orders you to sit upon the bathtub’s edge, and you do, arms wrapped around yourself. You’re sweating again, though it’s hardly warm in the bathroom. It sticks to your skin, chilling you to the core. Tim seems fine, even without a shirt to keep warm, but you can’t get a good read on him anyway. He’s too focused on picking out tools from the first aid kit that he took from the medicine cabinet. 

With his firm set face and calculated movements, you’re suddenly and uncomfortably vulnerable. You’re overtly aware of every wrong written into your flesh and of the wrongs torn into his arms as well, though they are far more faded than your own. He owns them and is all strength and knowledge as he goes to his knees, taking the more marked up arm in his hands and examining it closely. 

You hang your head and stare anywhere but the man holding your arm.

“Does anyone else know?”

His voice echoes strangely in the bathroom, with the door shut to give you the view of the extra towels draped over a hook nailed into the wall. They’re fairly new, still fluffy and the color none too faded. Your mother bought them for Tim and Jay, because she thinks they’re going to be staying here long term.

Will that be the case now that Tim knows how fucked up you still are?

You bite the inside of your cheek and look away. 

“No.”

“That’s a big problem,” Tim says bluntly, dabbing something sharp-smelling and stinging upon the smallest of the lacerations. You don’t even flinch. “I get it if you don’t want to tell me why you’re doing this, but, just saying, you’ll make things easier for both of us if you do.”

“Easier for you? How?” you ask, frowning. 

(Easier for him to make the decision of whether or not to take Jay and get the fuck away from the trainwreck that is you.)

He flicks his brown eyes up to meet yours for a moment.

“It’ll let me know how I might be able to help you.”

You would’ve laughed if he didn’t pick then to stick a fucking needle through your skin. You hiss through your teeth and narrow your eyes at him. He doesn’t even flinch and keeps on with his task.

“I doubt there’s much you can do.”

“Try me,” he pushes, ignoring the way your hand clenches into a pained fist at the constant stab of the needle. “I might as well be an actual therapist with all of the ones I visited. I should put it on my resume, really...”

He doesn’t attempt to fill the silence that comes after that. You aren’t intentionally quiet; you don’t know what to tell him or where to start. Surely he understands that, that it can’t all be put into a single sentence or utterance. This flows and ebbs, it warps from one event to the next and connects everything together, virus-like in the way that it infects everything with the same guilt, the same pain and urges and so, so much that the human body wasn’t built to properly process.

You know he could sit there all night, waiting on you. You’ve seen him do it for Jay.

It just depends on whether he gives that much of a damn about you. And--

(There’s an arm around you in bed, hot breath on your neck, and he opens his eyes. You expect him to flinch away.)

(He stares through the dark of the night, blinks at you.)

(The heat on your neck returns a moment later and he curls against you. You feel strangely safe.)

There’s too much uncertainty. You squirm.

“It’s a punishment thing,” you manage once he puts away the needle for good. Thank god. He looks at you, not a single hint of surprise in his face. You swallow the strange object in your throat and close your eyes. “I keep... trying to tell myself that none of it was me, what happened, any of it, but I can’t get it through to my head. It’s hard to believe it when I still remember looking down and seeing what I’d been doing and all the, the bl--” Another swallow. 

“The blood.”

Tim holds a roll of dressings that is too small to cover all of what you’ve got. That’s definitely your fault, trying to clumsily stem your bleeding and wrap up your work these past few weeks. He doesn’t look you in the eye as he rolls it across your arm for you.

“That’s the funny thing, isn’t it,” Tim says, fingers tracing lightly over your skin. You shiver and you look away, not from the pain or nerves but from something that shudders in your chest. “You can tell yourself all day and every day that you weren’t yourself and you weren’t in control, but you still can’t shake the feeling that you’re a piece of shit and you need a good kick in the ass.”

You don’t need to ask why he would say that. But you’re shocked with yourself for forgetting that he might understand what it’s like.

(The mask still lies at the bottom of his car’s trunk. You saw it, just once, when you stole two things from his car that day, the camera to be sold and the knife hidden away in your room.)

(Does he have a plan for it? Is it a souvenir? Is it your place to ask?)

“Punishing yourself isn’t going to get you anywhere, though,” Tim says eventually, once the roll of bandages is depleted. He throws aside the little wisp of white fabric left behind and goes digging in the kit again. There’s a box of band-aids waiting within that you hadn’t noticed before in all your peeks inside. He pulls out about five of them at first, looks at what he has left to work with, and plucks out five more.

“It’s only reinforcing the idea in you that it’s your fault,” Tim goes on, mechanical and methodical in the quick peeling of the band-aids and the precise placement of them. “You know you didn’t hurt any of us. You know it wasn’t you. So if you keep punishing yourself, you’re contributing to the idea that it /was/ you. You’re bullying your logic here.”

“Basically, I’m telling you what you probably already know: fucking stop because it’s not getting you anywhere and I’m not letting you drag yourself back down when Jay and I’ve gotten this far. You’re not going anywhere without us.”

He hangs onto your forearm for a second longer than needed and stares into your face with sharp eyes.

“And I’m not just saying that because Jay would kill me if I left you in the dirt. Okay?”

You swallow again as you force yourself to nod. It hurts. Not as bad as your chest does, though.

Tim climbs to his feet then, taking the kit with him and shutting it with a click. He puts it away and turns to face you again, crossing his arms upon his bare chest. His eyes bore through you, though you don’t curl away and hide as you might have a couple minutes ago. You return his gaze, touching the rough fabric wrapped around your arm with the tips of your fingers.

Your brain is quiet.

“So. You look like shit,” he says eventually. You crack the weakest smile.

“I bet I do.”

“Like, you’re about to keel over any moment.”

You nod, carefully rising from the bathtub. Your knees knock and threaten to give out from under you, and you must look shittier than you imagine, because he steps closer as though to catch you. 

“So, you’ll listen if I tell you to go to bed?” he asks, brow furrowing with genuine concern. You nearly laugh to yourself; Tim worrying over you will never make sense in your head. Nonetheless, you nod and take several cautious steps toward the hall. The mention of sleep reminds you of the man downstairs, curled up on the chair he has newly declared as his own.

That same man’s face sends a nervous jolt into your brain and reminds you that there is still one loose end to tie up here. 

“I’ll go to bed if you promise me one thing,” you say suddenly, whirling to face Tim at the top of the steps. He obliges and waits for you to continue, eyebrows raised. “You can’t tell him. If he knows, I’m just going to feel worse, and that’s not going to help any of us here.”

You don’t have to clarify when you say ‘him’. Tim sighs, reaching to pinch the bridge of his nose as he considers his answer. 

“I... guess I can do that,” he concedes. 

“But only if you let me check your arms every day, /and/,” he interjects just as you open your mouth to agree with his conditions. “I will keep quiet so long as he doesn’t ask me directly whether you’re hurting yourself. I’m not lying to him anymore.”

Though that sets off the most frustrated fire in your chest, you can’t bring yourself to tell him he should lie anyway. You completely understand why he would want it this way, and so you force your head to nod, jaw twitching.

“Glad we can agree, then,” Tim says as he stretches his arms behind his head. “But, I’m noticing you’re not in bed yet.”

“I’ve gotta get something first,” you huff, pushing at him. “I promise I’ll be in bed in like, five minutes.”

He rolls his eyes and heads back to the bathroom, voice echoing as he repeats your words; ‘five minutes’. The pipes clang about in the walls as Tim switches on the shower. 

You move down the steps, hanging onto the railing to keep from toppling over. The trip into the living room is thankfully uneventful, even with exhaustion riding heavy on your back. Your mother is where you left her, though her arm has flopped off of the couch at some point. You lift it back into place, tucking it against her side. She sighs contently and rolls onto her side, facing away from you.

(Maybe someday you’ll tell her. She loves you. She might understand. And as strong as she is, she doesn’t need to be protected from the horrors that you faced.)

(She can take on the world if she can take on your father.) 

(And you hope that she passed some of that strength down to you, you just have yet to find it.)

Jay hasn’t moved from his chair, though he has managed to curl into a tight ball with the knit blanket tangled around his legs. You approach him and gently tap at his face. He jerks from his slumber like a cat might, limbs flying out and even uttering a quiet ‘myah!’ noise. His foggy blue eyes blink rapidly through the dark, adjusting to the tug from dream to reality, and he soon realizes that he isn’t alone in the room. 

The man looks at you, and he immediately calms, a slow smile spreading on his face.

(Maybe someday you won’t think it’s a miracle that he can still smile at you.)

“I forgot how to walk, carry me to bed,” Jay commands dramatically, lifting his arms out from the blanket and wrapping them around your neck. He whines when you shake your head, and he makes a big deal about getting his feet on the floor, huffing as he struggles his legs out from the blanket.

“You can lean on me,” you offer in consolation. He takes you up on it, throwing an arm around your shoulders and pushing his head under your chin. You let him with an exasperated sigh, making sure to synchronize your sleepy walk with his. 

He doesn’t say anything on the way upstairs, and you think he might have somehow fallen back asleep and that you’re literally dragging him to bed. But once you’re past the threshold of your room, he unlinks himself from your side and steps in front of you, looking at you closely. 

His eyes fall to your bandages, and you have to hold your breath to keep from whimpering aloud.

“Alex.”

You hum in acknowledgement. Those long delicate fingers come up and stroke down the line of band-aids decorating the lower wounds, some crisscrossed and others standing on their lonesome. Jay tilts his head, a frown tugging at his lips. 

“Are you okay?”

You’re obviously not okay physically. He can’t be asking about that. But when you look at him and see the genuine worry in him, in the lip pulled between his teeth and the little quivers of his hands, you find that you can nod and even smile for him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

He seems doubtful at first, with the trembles in his hands remaining strong, but they grow still the moment you kiss him, a quick peck that still lets you enjoy the softness of his mouth.

Whether he truly believes you’re okay is up in the air, but he doesn’t question you further. Instead, he goes to bed, looking over his shoulder at you once he’s settled on his front. You join him, receiving the hint hidden in his stare.

With your wrapped arm slung around his shoulders and the other curled to your chest, you fall asleep quickly, faster than you thought possible. It doesn’t creep up on you as it normally does but slams upon you and drags you down by the ankles-- and as violent as it is, you couldn’t be more relieved.

Consciousness dangles over you a few moments later, with the black behind your eyelids breaking open and letting color shiver before your vision for a second or two. It’s a short reprieve, with dreams wrapping back around you sooner than you would expect.

Still, you were awake enough to be acutely aware of the sudden new weight upon the bed. That weight pressed itself to your back, and then there was a protective arm around you.

(The last time you fell asleep feeling this safe, Amy was burrowed into your back, whispering you down from the terrified heavens you’d worked yourself up into.)

(You know why this reminds you of those times.)


End file.
